Troubling the Troublemakers: Three Challenges to Post-Qualitative Inquiry

In recent years, a number of prominent scholars have criticized the current state of qualitative research and advocated a paradigm of post-qualitative inquiry (PQI). Incorporating insights from new materialism, PQI seeks to trouble what it calls conventional humanist qualitative methodology (CHQM). Although sympathetic to this overall project, the present article identifies and discusses three challenges in current PQI, namely the roles it ascribes to theory, to data, and to writing. It is argued that PQI risks succumbing to 1) theory-centrism, 2) researcher deletion, and 3) meta-reflexivity. By pinpointing these three challenges, the article hopes to nudge PQI one step further in its continuous theoretical “becoming.”